Open Source Build Systems in Java

Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies.

Hudson monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Hudson focuses on the following two jobs: 1. Building/testing software projects continuously, just like CruiseControl or DamageControl. In a nutshell, Hudson provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continoues build increases the productivity. 2. Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Hudson keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.

Ivy is a free java based dependency manager, with powerful features such as transitive dependencies, ant integration, maven repository compatibility, continuous integration, html reports and many more.

Maven is a Java project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is based on the concept of a project object model (POM) in that all the artifacts produced by Maven are a result of consulting a well defined model for your project. Builds, documentation, source metrics, and source cross-references are all controlled by your POM. Look here to see the full list of Maven's features.

Savant is an extension to the popular ant build system from the Apache group.

Ant Hill is an Ant library meant to perform remote invocation of build targets via XMPP (Jabber) protocol. To be more specific Ant Hill provides a mechanism to implement Remote Target Invocation. The client / server approach allows to work on clusters and coordinate a large number of machines. Ant Hill has been written to be extensible, it is possible to define quickly new Remote Commands. Ant Hill provides error reporting through Remote Exception Propagation and several debugging features.

Anthill OS is a Build Management Server. Anthill allows multiple users to work together and consistently access only the latest build, complete with changes from all programmers working on a project. Anthill performs a checkout from the source repository of the latest version of a project before every build and tags the repository with a unique build number. Anthill then updates a project intranet site with artifacts from the latest build.

Antmod is a build management, release management, and repository management tool. Its implementation is an Ant-based extensible engine for retrieving, versioning, building, and deploying code to and from Subversion or CVS. It standardizes build files for Java projects and provides build plugins for various tasks. It also standardizes tagging and branching for both CVS and Subversion, and its module and repository management can also be used for non-Java projects. It greatly speeds up Java software development, promotes reuse of Java software, and standardizes the build-test- release cycle.

APB is a simple, yet powerfull, project build system that inherits some ideas from Ant and Maven while trying to avoid the use of complex XML files to define the metadata of the project. Project Definition is done in Java so you have the full power of Java plus the benefit of using your favorite IDE to edit the configuration files. Here are some of the features APB provides out-of-the-box: * Simple project definition based on default layouts, but with flexibility to accomodate your preferred one. * Model based builds: APB is able to build projects based on metadata about the project. * Full extensibility using Java * Dependency management * Full project lifecycle, including compilation, packaging and testing. * Coverage support during testing * Documentation generation * Generation of project files for common IDEs (Currently Intellij Idea) * Ant tasks to integrate APB projects into foreign contexts. * Command line invocation including shell-completion

Autojar helps creating jar files of minimal size from different inputs like own classes, external archives etc. It starts from one or more given classes (e.g., an applet), recursively searches the bytecode for references to other classes, extracts these classes from the input archives, and copies them to the output. The resulting archive will only contain the classes that are really needed. Thus one can keep size and loading time of applets low or make applications independent of installed libraries. In a similar way, autojar can search directories and archives for other resources (like image files), extract them and copy them to the output. Although autojar can't know exactly which classes get loaded dynamically, it can search the bytecode for invocations of Class.forName() and warn about it. In some cases (constant class name), it can even find out which classes are to be loaded, and add them automatically to the output.

Bee is a Java-based build tool. Bee inherited some principles of Make. Bee provides more procedure languages constructions, so generally can be used for script programming. It's highly extendable and base DTD can be easily changed, so it allows to create own dialects of Bee.

Continuum is an easy-to-use, Continous Integration server for building Java-based projects, with built-in support for Maven 2, Maven 1, Ant and Shell Scripts.

CPMake is a build tool similar to GNU make where as it lets file dependencies determine what tasks to perform. The build files can be written in either BeanShell or Jython script. CPMake has a built in dependency parser for both Java and C/C++ files.

CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.

GenJar is a specialized Ant task that builds jar files based on class dependencies rather than simply the contents of a directory.

Invicta is an open-source build management tool. Using simple project definition files, it generates powerful build scripts (Apache ANT's), while hiding their complexity.

JAM consists of a collection of Ant scripts designed to perform common Java/J2EE build tasks such as compilation, packaging, testing, deployment and J2EE application server control. JAM combines Mavens high-level project description and repository features (via a Maven-to-Ant bridge) with the low-level capabilities of Ant. By assembling JAM modules, one is able to quickly create sophisticated IDE-independent build scripts. JAM supports various J2EE application servers, XDoclet invocation, JUnit unit testing, Apache Cactus integration testing, UML-based code generation and other technologies.

Jar Jar Links is a utility that makes it easy to repackage Java libraries and embed them into your own distribution. This is useful for two reasons: * You can easily ship a single jar file with no external dependencies. * You can avoid problems where your library depends on a specific version of a library, which may conflict with the dependencies of another library.

Jenkins CI, formerly known as \"Hudson Labs\". Jenkins monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Jenkins focuses on the following two jobs: Building/testing software projects continuously, just like CruiseControl or DamageControl. In a nutshell, Jenkins provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continuous build increases the productivity. Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Jenkins keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.

This application is based on the make utility which is part of most Unix systems, but is designed to support the task of writing platform independe

LuntBuild is a powerful build automation and management tool. Continuous integration or daily build can be easily setup through a clean web interface. Generated builds are well managed through functions such as search, categorization, promotion, patching, deletion, etc. It also acts as a central build artifacts download area for your whole team.

Proximity (px-core) is a generic fetch-and-cache engine with various extra capabilities like indexing. The Px-Core module is driven by Maven bindings (px-core-maven) to implement a Maven Proxy application behaviour. Proximity is in function somewhere between http-proxy and proactive-mirror. Proximity is not HTTP Proxy. One of it's primary use is as Java web application to serve as maven proxy on our company's intranet. As for reducing outgoing traffic (caching central and other maven repos), aggregating more repositories (reducing project config) with acting as one logical repository and for publishing in-house and other external maven artifacts which are not uploadable to ibiblio (like commercial projects, J2EE Jars, etc...).

Rant stands for Remote Ant. It is a distributed build system that allows an Ant build file to launch builds on other systems and receive exceptions should they occur.

Schmant is a build tool for building software artifacts. It uses the scripting support in Java 6 for running build scripts, so build scripts can be written in any supported script language. Schmant provides a set of tasks for common build script tasks, such as compiling Java code, building JAR files, exporting code from Subversion repositories and performing text substitution in files. Schmant aims to be feature-compatible with and much easier to use than Apache Ant.